


A Cat's Life

by DaisyNinjaGirl



Category: Kisa the Cat (Brown Fairy Book - Andrew Lang)
Genre: All Fairy Tales Happen In The Same Continuity, Gen, Making Restitution, Misses Clause Challenge, back story, polymorph
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 09:12:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2845718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaisyNinjaGirl/pseuds/DaisyNinjaGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you mess up, sometimes making it right can take a long time.  Even longer when you're a cat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Cat's Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Morbane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/gifts).



There came a day when Asa realised that engineering some dreadful tragedy, and then saving the participants from certain catastrophe, would speed matters up considerably.  There was probably a reason, she thought, settling her head on her paws, that she’d been turned into a cat.  A _dog_ could never have thought of something so clever; dogs were stupid.  A vague memory came to her of a Beast man, and a rose, and a marriage; and also of a garden and an apple and a snake – well, it had been done before, she supposed.  But not by a _dog_.

And yet, the thread of thought wound round and around in her musings, while arranging for people to get into trouble for gain and profit was a very _cattish_ thing to do, her aspirations were to become human again, and it probably would not do to drift _quite_ too far from humanish thoughts.  Such a pity.

She was living then with a young Queen who took her everywhere.  One day, they were driving out in a crystal glass carriage when the Queen bent her ear with a tale of woe: she could not have a baby.  The kitten that Asa bore, like her mother a fine feline with smoky grey fur and china blue eyes, was all the child the Queen might know.  There was sorry and pain in her heart.  Alas to the Queen, for Asa might play with her own small daughter, and the Queen might play with Asa alone.  There was sorrow, yet also acquisitiveness, in the Queen’s voice: Kisa the Kitten was a precious bundle that her mother guarded jealously.  Yes, Asa thought, sprawled in the sunlight that mottled the carriage seat, it took one to know one.  This would never do.  “Don’t worry,” she told the Queen, “I’ll fix it.”  She laid one paw conspiratorially on the Queen’s wrist.  “Crying never does any good.”

When they returned to the palace, Asa fetched little Kisa from the crevice where she hid her baby at those times when she could not be in attendance and trotted off into the woods.  There was a pool that she knew, where the snow lingered into early summer and it took the height of noon for sunbeams to wind their way through the forest branches to the centre of the pool.  A fairy lived there.

Asa settled onto her hind quarters and set her paws primly together, Kisa hanging from her mouth.  She twitched her head from side to side a few times.  At last she dropped Kisa to the ground and washed her, the proper way, full long body strokes of rasping tongue so that the kitten might know she was truly clean – fairies made her nervous, and it gave her something to do.

At last there was a glimmer and a shadow, and a thing that was not there became there.  A voice like bells (not the tinkly silly sort of bell, but the deep flawed tone of a tenor bell with a crack in it) rang through the glade.  “So Asa, now Asa the Cat; you’ve come to visit me in my solitude.”

“I might have done,” Asa said, “or I might have stopped for a drink of water.  Or to rest my delicate paws, and you just happened to be here.”

“Indeed.  And while I happen to reside by this pool where you rest your paws, is there aught you wish to converse of?”

“Harrumph,” Asa said, feeling that the fairy was pushing her to the point rather too quickly.  “Well.  Since you ask, there is a favour one might do.  But there are others who could do it just as well,” she added airily, “there’s no need to put yourself out.”

“A woman in a glass carriage.  Sterility and loneliness.  Something might be done, for a price.”

Asa twitched her tail, once.  “What price?”

“You say you have thirst?  Drink.”  The cat, her fur the colour of smoke, the colour of steel, peered down at the snow-cold water.  “The kitten, also.  She is included in the price.”

Asa sighed.  It was regrettable that the fairy she knew to ask for favours was the sister of the Other One.  There was bad blood there, but what could one do?  She bent her head and lapped up the water, crystal ice on her tongue, and in her stomach, and in her head, and then she was _there_ , back there on that dreadful morning when Gustav, stricken, had looked at her from the other side of the laboratory and said “Asa, what did you _do?_ ” and Asa had twitched her shoulders and switched her (new! strange!) tail and asserted the first truly cattish thing of her life: “I _meant_ to do that” shortly before things got very bad indeed. 

Asa _yowled_ , her fur bristled into a bottle brush, her back arched so tightly it almost broke.  Beside her, Kisa screamed in sympathy.  “Do you expect me to be _sorry?_ ” she spat.  “I _refuse_ to be sorry.  So there.”

She stalked away home, her mouth full of kitten neck, at least so long as it took her to get out of sight of the fairy, and then _belted_.  “Discretion is the best part of valour,” she mumbled to Kisa.  “Look out for yourself first,” she added, “it will keep you alive.  I promise.”

The favour worked, and then it didn’t work.  The Queen did, in fact, get pregnant, and spent nine months getting ever bigger and ever more content until she rivalled, in Asa’s opinion, the smugness known only by a cat who has found a bowl of fresh cream set before a warm fire with a comfortable lap thrown in as lagniappe.  “I suppose it will happen when the baby is born,” she said doubtfully to Kisa.

But it didn’t.

There was a baby, of course, made of snow and sunbeams and the Queen was very happy, and Kisa was very happy, and Asa, regretfully, was very _un_ happy and ignored.  At last, she gave up and approached the forest pool again, cautious, and waited for the deep tenor bell to ring out again.

“Ah, Asa, little Asa, you pass on by again.  And how are your delicate little paws?”

“They do alright,” she said, licking one of them.

“And the child born to your precious Queen, how fares she?”

“Ingibjorg?  She doesn’t look so much like a hedgehog anymore,” Asa sniffed.

“And your own dear kitten?  Darling Kisa – there is sorrow in my heart that you did not bring your child to attend on me this day.” 

 _That_ was sarcasm.  It took one to know one, obviously.  Asa licked her paws very carefully – it was important to dig in between the claws to get them properly clean.  Alas, the fairy was not going to let that one go without an answer.  At last: “She stayed behind.  She wanted to cuddle with Ingibjorg.  They’re _friends_.”

“Ah,” the fairy said wisely.  “Friendship is an eternal gift.”  Silence fell on the glade again.

Asa sighed.  She was going to have to come right out and say it, entirely contrary to the proper way of things.  “There was a curse.”

“Yes?” the fairy said encouragingly.

“The curse was that I should help someone, to be released from cattishness.  I _did_ help someone.”

“Dear me,” rang out the bell, “was that the only clause of the curse?  Was there not, perhaps, a rider?”

“What?” Asa said sharply, bristling.  Things had been confusing for a while, after the Change.

“Of course,” the Fair One said, “my sister told me about it.  Some slattern and her lover caused trouble and she transformed the pair of them until conditions were met.  The _dog_ , well, the dog has a journey of his own, but the _cat_ \- the cat shall remain so until it has performed a kindly task that has never been wrought before.”  She smiled, with sharp and pointy teeth.  “Getting someone knocked up is old hat, I’m afraid.  Why, even you were able to manage it.”

Asa hissed.  Never trust a fairy, it was in their nature to screw you.  She trotted back to the palace, threaded her way to the little Princess’ room and hissed again – Kisa and the baby Ingibjorg were curled around each other, snow-pale hair and smoke grey fur a unified whole.  She jumped into the crib and pulled her daughter away, carried her out of the palace and into the woods.  It had been nice here, but it was time to move on.  “You’re not allowed to love anyone more than me,” she told Kisa.  “We’re better off out of it.”

***

“I’ve had a think,” Kisa’s mother told her, one day when they were trotting on the long road.  “It’s not enough to be helpful, we have to be creative.  So I figure, let’s be _really_ creative.  There’s a giant, see, a couple of valleys away in Carabas.  Giants are easy to get one over.”  Asa paused and touched Kisa’s nose with her paw.  “That’s a piece of sage advice for you, child of mine.  Giants are easy to mess with, they’re dumb as a very dumb post, the whole lot of them.”  Kisa wasn’t sure but she _thought_ she heard her mother mutter also “unless they’re the front man for a freaking _fairy_ ,” before her parent continued with The Plan.  “So we find a shmuck, see, groom them up, run a con on the Big Guy – something really… _creative_ , then the village idiot owes us a favour and _boom_ we’re human again.  Sounds good, yes?”

Kisa nodded earnestly.  Her mother was good with plans.  They hardly ever had to run away.

As they rounded a corner, they saw a windmill, the years hanging heavy on its structure.  A young man with a gormless expression in a farmer’s heavy smock was leading a depressed donkey into the yard.  “Here, Puss, Puss?” he called.  “Good Puss?”

Asa brightened and trotted faster.  “And la, my love, a Mark appeareth for us…”

A ginger tomcat, his fur burnished into a bronze sheen, leapt onto a fencepost as they approached.  “Why,” he said, “can I believe my eyes?  Oh, my whiskers and paws, could that be… Asa?”

The grey cat stopped suddenly.  “Antoine,” she said with curled lip and slightly revealed fang.  “So you’re here.”

“Of course, of course.  I live here now.  And how are you and yours?”

Asa studiously licked a paw.  Kisa watched her mother carefully and copied the gesture.  “We’re thriving, as it happens,” Kisa’s mother told the tom.  “Seeing the sights, travelling the wide world, having a ball.  I should have turned myself into a cat _years_ ago.”

“I see, I see,” Antoine nodded, his smile toothy and white.  “How’s Gustav these days?  His transformation sitting well with him?”

“Gustav and I have parted ways,” Asa said stiffly.  “It was a mutually agreeable decision.”

“Of course.  Welp, I must toodles – my young man has just got back from the cobblers and we’ve got some people to con.  You know how it is – kings to lie to, giants to murder… ”

“Good luck, then,” and they walked away.  As they left, Kisa heard her mother sniff at the gaudy red boots the miller had produced from a sack.  “So _gauche_ ,” she said.  “And why would a cat need _spurs_ …  I’m telling you, Kisa, this will all end badly – last time I saw _that_ one, he was running away with his tail between his legs – _literally_.  Bah humbug!”  But her mother was very good with plans, and there would be a new one soon.

***

They stayed in a lot of places, the two smokey grey cats with the china blue eyes.  Kisa the Cat grew up knowing kings and wizards, thieves, vagabonds, witches, lost princes and even the occasional mime, although never for very long.  They even helped people, sometimes, perhaps more by luck than planning, but it did happen – just… it was never quite a unique enough act of kindness to fill the terms of the peculiar curse Asa and Kisa lived under.

There was one place that Kisa always thought fondly of, an ice pale palace in the middle of winter.  There was no con this time, just a warm fire and understanding kitchen staff and, Asa had said, sometimes you needed a break from the long road.  The lady of the house, another Queen, took a fondness to the two kitchen cats, and congratulated them on the mice they had caught to please the cook.  She would invite them up to her solar from time to time, to rest in what sun there was in the deep of winter while she embroidered careful stitches of white on white.  The Queen had her own sorrow, of course, she wanted a baby – Kisa rested her head on her paws and sighed.  Helping someone have a baby had already been done, more than once.  But she butted up against the Queen’s knee, and laid her chin on the woman’s lap to have her head petted.  One day as the Queen stitched, she pricked her finger, and made a wish for a daughter with ebon-dark hair and snow-pale skin, and lips the colour of red blood, and Kisa wanted to tell her no – the proper kind of baby was snow and sun beams, but Asa had come in, and Kisa jumped down obediently because her mother didn’t like it when she got too attached to a mark.

“You can have everything you want, as long as you love me best,” Asa said, but her heart wasn’t in it.  She took Kisa down to their spot in the kitchen, made her lie down and washed the young cat – the proper way, with long full body strokes, so that Kisa might know she was truly clean.

Then Spring came, and there were tulips and daffodils and as the palace grew over with greenery it stopped reminding her so intensely of a girl with snow-pale hair, and Kisa didn’t mind leaving so much.  Her feet were feeling itchy anyway.

***

The last place Asa and Kisa stayed together was also the nicest.  Well, nice in a homey sense – it was a little house hidden away in a valley so secret the sky seemed small.  Asa had said when they arrived there that they wouldn’t stay for long – palaces and castles and cities were where the main chance was, but Kisa had a limp from all the walking, and Asa was getting arthritis, and the smart money, so Asa said, was to find a cushy spot to rest up over the winter again.  Her mother, although still a vital force personality-wise, was starting to lose a certain essence of vigour and vim and needed to spend more time in a doze by the fire.  Kisa didn’t worry about it – the next plan would come in time.

The woman who owned the house didn’t seem to mind them inviting themselves to stay.  Old Mother, she called herself, and she was fond of both of them, but particularly Asa.  Every evening they would perform a dance of elegant nothings – yes, you may sit on my lap.  Is the cushion sufficiently plumped for you?  Perhaps this basket might rest your weary chin and soothe the curve of your aching back?  A small treat to tide you over until dinner time?  Asa lapped it up, of course, but Kisa noticed that Old Mother seemed to enjoy having someone to make a fuss over as well.

There were… others like them, who lived there in that little house with Old Mother.  There was a donkey who disconsolately ate through a barrel of flowers every day looking for the correct one, and the man who took care of the stables and the garden wore a robe with a very wide skirt (he called himself a dervish) and had but one eye.  Ash, he said.  Ash and a djinn had destroyed his eye a long time ago and in a place far away when he had opened a door from foolishness.  And there was a pig, and a brightly coloured bird, and a house maid with crippled feet who told Kisa about a wonderful dance and an ill-treated step-sister and the _other_ house maid who kept coughing up toads and…  There were a lot of people there who had a _story_ , was the point. 

Kisa asked Old Mother how that came about once, on a day when frost crept in fingers along the panes of glass.  “It takes one to know one,” Old Mother told her gently.  “Sometimes you reach a point in life where you aren’t the hero of your own story, but a supporting character in someone else’s.  Maybe even the villain.”  She traced a line of frost with a wrinkled fingertip.  “And if you’re going to be an exile, you might as well do so in good company.”

“Were you a villain in someone else’s story?” Kisa asked Old Mother very seriously.  The old woman had always been kind to them.

“Oh yes.  Dear me, yes, I stole a baby.”  Old Mother reached out a hand and produced a red dew-tipped rose from behind Kisa’s ear.  “Bought, to be precise, but on my terms.  And then I took her away and tried to make her mine alone, and then, perhaps, I may have lost my temper a little when she tried to belong to someone else instead.”

“I’m all of Asa’s,” the smokey grey cat told the witch.  “And she’s all of mine.”

“Really, little cat?  You don’t belong just a little to someone else?  And Asa doesn’t belong just a little to me?”

“Well…” Kisa twitched her tail.  “There was this Girl once.  She was so pale, like the sun on snow, and she liked it when I slept next to her.   She probably won’t remember me,” she added wistfully.

A new thought came to her.  “Old Mother?  Why do babies always belong to their mothers?  Aren’t they supposed to belong to fathers as well?”  She remembered what Sarah the Housemaid had told her about step-fathers.

“Sometimes they do,” Old Mother said carefully.  “Sometimes it doesn’t work out.”

“Hah!” Asa spat, coming into the room.  “You don’t have a father.  Your father was turned into a _dog_.  Dogs are stupid and obedient and too loyal to know where the main chance is.  This curse would have been _easy_ for a dog.”

“Yes, mother,” Kisa said humbly.

“Do you know how hard it is to be _nice_ all the time?  To strangers?  Shmucks I don’t care about?  _Dogs_ know how to be nice.  I’m not _nice._ We’re stuck as cats because I don’t know how to be _nice_.  I _hate_ dogs.  I’m never going to be one.”

Old Mother held out a wrinkled hand to the grey cat and stroked a finger gently down Asa’s spine.  “My darling girl.  For the right person it will be easy.”

***

When the end came, it came quickly.  Spring was not yet present, but nudging its way into awareness, the way a cat might poke it’s whiskers up a sleeping human’s nose at breakfast time.  Kisa was out in the snow with her mother, matching her footprints to the older cat’s so that their trail behind them was a straight line of paw and paw, when they heard a horse trotting, and armour jingling, and the huff of breathing in cold air – a stranger was come to the valley.

“Ho, there, young Cats,” the stranger on the horse called out to them.  “Know you of a witch about these parts?  In a time long ago and a place far away she called herself Mother Gothel.”

“I’ve never heard of anyone called Gothel,” Asa shrugged diffidently.  “Probably you’ve got the wrong place.  Hey, why do you have those scars around your eyes?”

The knight shook his head and kept on riding.  Kisa sloped around the back of the hill and took the shortcut to Old Mother’s house – she needed to be warned.  The old lady had come out, her shawl wrapped tightly around her.  The two house maids, and the dervish, and the pig and the bird and the donkey stood behind her, all looking grim.

Trotting along the road, Asa was keeping pace with the knight’s horse, dancing around the horse’s hooves, keeping up a running commentary, slowing the man down.  “So you’ve been to Carabas, yeah?  Where there’s that Marquis?  Now that guy’s an idiot if I’m not mistaken.  Dumb as a brick, right?  Did you ever meet a guy called Ivan?  Ivan the Trickster?  How about -?” as the knight kept trying, politely, to deflect the commentary and dodge past her. 

At last he arrived at the cottage gate and pulled up his horse.  “Mother Gothel!” he cried.  “I have come to pass judgement on your crimes!”  The man’s sword was steel-grey, the colour of cats, and he held it low and dangerously.

“It was a long time ago, young prince,” Old Mother said.  “You haven’t found your own happy ending for yourself yet?”

“My wife does not forgive.” He swung up his sword as if to strike off the old lady’s head.

But Asa leapt up, and wrapped her paws around his face.  “Hello, big boy,” she purred, and the man flinched and threw the cat onto the ground. 

Everything stopped.  A thing that was not there became there, and the world bent around itself, and then there was a small woman lying on the ground, with a shock of salt and pepper hair and a spine twisted as no human’s back should be.  “Well, damn,” Asa said.  “If I’d stayed a cat just a moment longer, I could have landed on my feet.”

“I’m sorry!” the man cried.  “I’m so sorry – I didn’t mean…!”

Mother Gothel looked up at him, silvery grey tears streaming down her cheeks.  “Was it worth it to you?  All these years of seeking revenge?  You and that vexed girl Rapunzel couldn’t just decide to be happy?”  She knelt and stroked Asa’s face softly.  “Oh my darling, darling girl.  I wasn’t supposed to be the right person.”

Kisa hissed at the knight, sudden and harsh, and his horse bolted away.  “Get out of here!” she howled.

They buried Asa, human at the end, her precious gift of kindness and also bravery built on top of all the other little kindnesses that had been done for self-centred reasons. The important thing was they they were kind.  Kisa washed her mother’s face very carefully, and Mother Gothel gave her a shroud of soft grey wool knitted in the same colour as her fur, and then they let the earth cover her.  At the end, Old Mother asked Kisa if she would like to stay, and said that she would always be welcome in this little house in its secret valley, but Kisa said no, no her feet were itchy.

She had lost the person who belonged to her most of all, but as the day appeared in which Spring stopped messing about politely with whiskers and jumped directly onto someone’s head, she looked up and sniffed and trotted away into the wide world and onto the long road.  There was a Girl somewhere made of snow and sunbeams who must not be allowed to forget the kitten who had curled up on her pillow. 

And Ingibjorg was found, and the friendship returned as if there had never been a gap of year on year and they agreed to meet the next day, until _someone_ made a mess of it.  It didn’t take Kisa to find out the truth of it – there had been a squirrel watching the whole affair, and he told her the whole of it.

 _Her_ Girl had been stolen by a Giant.  A _Giant_ had gotten one over on _her_.  This was not an appropriate reality.  Kisa brightened as she recalled sage words from her dear, flawed, _loving_ mother: Giants are easy to mess with.  That dumb as a very dumb post lout was going to be Very Sorry Indeed that he had caused trouble for a person who Kisa considered hers.  There was a small horse and cart tied up by a farmhouse – she leapt onto the pony’s back and told him to get a move on into the woods.

As they galloped through the mossy forest, Kisa opened her mouth in joy.  The game was afoot!

**Author's Note:**

> “in a valley so secret the sky seemed small” – line stolen from G. K. Chesterton’s “I think I will not hang myself today” because I like it.  
> Thanks to my beta reader for suggesting the Puss in Boots interlude. Also, I’m sorry, this story ended up sadder than I’d planned – hopefully the wisecracks help a little.


End file.
